MCLA loses a leader, and so do we

The news that MCLA President Mary Grant would be moving on to another job was going to come eventually. Any way you look at it, her 12 years at the Massachusetts College of Liberals Arts have been a success — badly needed new buildings, improved enrollments, more programs, more collaboration with the community, and a hard to define buzz that things were looking up. Her skill at doing what isn’t a very easy job can’t have gone unnoticed.

In her steady, soft-spoken way Grant has been a great advocate for her school and perhaps more than that, she had become an important leader for the county as it continued to search for a way to get back on track. It was her predecessors that set MCLA on its current course, moving it away from being a very regional state college with a larger, important vision that would have state-wide appeal. It was a good bit of foresight, even though as with anything it had its detractors for awhile — I know some were particularly irritated about removing the words “North Adams” from the school’s title, a foretaste of the kind of identity crisis that continues today. But Grant was the one that guided the institution through the process of making it work, finding along the way ways to leverage our strengths and assets to become someplace new and better.

It is part of the job that top-level administrators never stay in any one place for long. My biggest fear was that some not-very-good little college with more money than prestige would steal her away for some huge amount of money. It’s great to see her leave for a place in the University of North Carolina at Asheville that shares this mission of bringing a liberal arts education — long seen as a luxury only for kids at the top of the socioeconomic ladder — to everyone else.